My own admittedly uninformed understanding is that there was cheating all around, but VW was by far the most flagrant. BMW and Mercedes diesels required DEF (diesel exhaust fluid), whereas VW did not. Marketing and/or executive leadership (again, as per my understanding) pushed the notion that the additive would make diesels appear to be less attractive and who wants to add a second liquid beyond fuel every few hundred miles?
But weren't they all cheating? The diesels with DEF were still above the legal limits, albeit to a lesser degree than the VW's who didn't even bother with DEF because, I guess, if you're going to cheat anyway...
What about it? No vehicle will do it from the factory, so I don't see how it's relevant here. It's the result of running a diesel massively, massively over-rich (with aftermarket tuning), and it's absolute hell on the engine - that amount of diesel in the cylinder washes down the cylinder walls and wipes off the lubricating film, so the cylinder wear is insane from even fairly short periods of it.
Even in diesel truck circles, "the other 99.9%" of truck owners think it's just as stupid as everyone else does - in addition to being engine abuse, it tends to attract an awful lot of unwelcome attention, and there are people who won't distinguish between "You've modified your truck to belch a column of coal black smoke for attention" and "An older diesel puts out a bit of brown smoke if you get on it hard suddenly," which can lead to some nuisance emissions testing.
My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions. I try my best to avoid it, but if I need to get a trailer up to speed (especially quickly, if someone is coming up hard behind me), it'll put out a bit of brown smoke until the turbo gets spinning.
None of that has anything to do with VW, though. They were burning clean, which any sort of modern high pressure injection system will typically do, they just had really high NOx emissions for their emissions tier.
I used to live next to a freeway and I know the true cost of dirty diesel engines. Get on any US freeway and you'll notice that while a majority of diesels are fine, there is a minority that is belching soot any time the driver steps on the gas. This is simply unacceptable - this tiny minority of diesels kills people over time - especially the poorer populations who live close to the freeways. I would prefer much more stringent enforcement where any truck belching smoke can be spot checked and impounded.
The emissions testing is not a "nuisance". It saves lives. A noisy motorcycle would be a better example of a nuisance.
I’m obsessive about using the air recirculation button when driving to isolate the cabin any time I’m in the wake of a diesel vehicle, for this reason.
While health issues from diesel particulate is documented on a wide statistical basis, there’s ample reason to believe single exposure events may lead to individual negative health outcomes i.e. getting a lungful one time might just kill you.
The pointless out of band emissions testing of an emissions compliant truck (that easily passes the tests) having to go in for a test because it smokes a bit under hard acceleration and someone called it in for "rolling coal" is very much a nuisance to the truck owner and a waste of time/resources for all parties involved.
An older diesel engine can smoke a decent bit under hard acceleration and still be entirely emissions legal - it's not until you get into the particulate filters in the... oh, 2010s or so (not sure, I don't have anything that new) that you can contain all the particulate matter.
If your stance is that diesels shouldn't be permitted, or that anything older than a certain age shouldn't be allowed to be registered, that's fine, but that's not what I'm referring to here.
My stance is that diesels should only be permitted if they satisfy the EPA 2008 diesel PM standards or better. No older engines should be permitted unless they are retrofitted to comply with the standard and pass regular state tests. We could have a "cash for clunkers" type program to incentivize them to be lawfully scrapped.
I appreciate that you are as annoyed as the rest of us at the coal rollers. I think we need much more aggressive fines and impounds for those, too.
Destroying nearly-new trucks for emissions reasons is a pretty questionable use of funding (and, yes, a 12 year old truck is still quite new) - and you're not going to be able to get away with a token few thousand dollars to encourage people to scrap them.
A decently maintained heavy road engine (tractor trailer) is a million+ mile motor, easily. A medium truck engine (think your typical toolbox work trucks, tow trucks, International boom trucks, etc) will do 300k-500k miles, and depending on how much the truck is used, that may be 20-30 years of operation. Same for the light diesels - they tend to have a practical service life of decades. My 24 year old truck is starting to be a little bit more rare on the roads out here, but I still see plenty...
If you know what to listen for, you can identify a lot of diesels by sound - and the International T444E (mid-90s design, the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke is that engine with a few tweaks) has a very distinctive snap at idle from the single shot injectors. There are still an awful lot of those on the road, and the youngest of them is almost 20 years old.
"Destroying 30-50% of the diesel fleet on the road" is not something I'd be particularly excited about - especially since new vehicle production isn't particularly environmentally friendly either. If you're specifically focused on the PM emissions, there may be ways to retrofit those older engines (at the cost of likely a substantial increase in fuel burn from the backpressure), but if you're going to hold them to the newer NOx standards, there's just no way to do it. They don't have the injection pressure and EGR systems in place to do it.
As of right now, they'd just be replaced with new diesels, because there are no electrics meaningfully on the market that solve the problems a large diesel engine solves right now. Plenty have been announced, very few are actually shipping, and of those announced, everyone is silent on their towing capabilities (I don't care if you can tow 15k lbs on a receiver mount, that kind of trailer weight should be on a gooseneck or 5th wheel hitch, and everyone is really, really silent on how their announced electric trucks fit either of those).
I also very much dislike "Cash for Clunkers" type programs in that they're one of the most nastily regressive programs one can possibly create. That program ruined the bottom end of the used car market for most of a decade, and permanently destroyed a lot of vehicles of a particularly easy to maintain and cheap to operate era (low pressure single point throttle body injection, not a ton of luxury features). It was a nice little handout to the next couple tiers up, but if you were operating in the "$100 car" realm (which were a thing at the time, I've owned 4 sub-$400 cars in the 2000-2010 era), it was absolutely devastating to your ability to find cheap cars. That sort of effective floor on vehicle prices for a while, followed by the hollowing out of anything below that price in the market... eh. Let's not do that again.
As far as coal rollers, though, the best thing that could happen is that everyone stops getting worked up about them and ignore them. They do it for the attention, and I'll suggest that it works really, really well. If you see one, get the plate, call it into your local emissions enforcement hotline if that's a thing, and move on with life. Everyone getting all wound up about them on the internet is exactly what I expect a lot of them enjoy about it anymore.
I seem to not have communicated my point very clearly.
Diesel particulate pollution kills very significant numbers of people, and it kills poor people (who have to live next to the freeway and on urban thoroughfares) disproportionately. I don't care about how easy it is to find a $100 car; I care about policies that we can enact today that can stop truck owners and manufacturers from externalizing their pollution costs onto everyone else. You make a good point about PM being easier to address than NOx - PM is more of an urgent concern given what we now know about its health effects. Whether by retrofitting or by retiring, the engines that emit more PM than the 2008 standards have to go.
New diesels are fine. I agree with you EV trucks are not here yet. The point is there are trucks out there that are 10,000x more harmful in PM emissions than the same exact capability new truck. They need to be removed.
Of course just scrapping diesels on the road isn't the best/most efficient idea. We have the technology to do EV conversions, we just need to make that more cost effective. Volkswagon has talked about shipping a mass produced "crate" system that could fit into older VW vehicles' engine blocks. Though if we are talking *trucks* the big player that should be building an EV conversion kit yesterday is Ford, who still seem to act like EV is a passing fad they can just dip their toes in and not get serious about.
Right, but the parent's point is that these things do not actually exist. VW "talking" about doing something or Ford "should" have done something does not describe things that are actually available on the market today, regardless of whether or not the technology is within our capabilities.
They do exist in small shops that are doing EV conversions every day (and have been for years).
The thing missing is mass production to drive costs down from it being an artisanal thing with used Tesla and pinball machine parts to being a reliable mini-industry. Those artisanal projects are on the market though, and have been for some time. They have a market price, it's just that that price isn't as cheap as we would all like it to be, hence the emphasis on mass production being a currently unfilled need and that it is on at least one manufacturer's stated roadmap and should have been on at least one other's. The flipside is already happening "while we wait". Some of those artisanal shops are standardizing their own tools and producing their own kits, and speeding up their processes and building on economies of scale to get those things cheaper, and if the manufacturers won't officially support it, the aftermarket will, as it often does.
"We" do? If you know of any, please, share. I know a lot of people out here who own trucks who would absolutely love a reasonably priced ($20k or so?) conversion kit for a truck that would leave you with 100 miles or so of range with a 10k lb construction trailer (fully enclosed) or similar.
I'm aware of the old electric Rangers one can find on rare occasions (swap their lead for lithium and you have a truck, though not one that can either haul much or tow much). I know of a couple more or less DIY conversion kits for vehicles (EVWest has some nice ones, $5k-$10k before you add a battery, for light VWs), but a 200hp class motor alone for a retrofit is close to $10k, and that's before controllers, battery pack, anything.
But in general, I'm really not sure converting existing trucks is the right option, because how you build a truck for an ICE is probably not how you build a truck for electric drivetrains. If you just replace the input to the transmission with an electric motor, you end up with quite poor drivetrain efficiency - there's a lot of stuff spinning that you wouldn't use for a pure electric drivetrain, but if you're going to swap out pieces you don't need (transmission, maybe the transfer case - a motor hung on the front and rear differential, geared properly, makes a compelling argument), costs start going up again. And then there's the mass and weight of the battery pack. You could put a pack in the bed without too much trouble, but... whoops, you've just lost your access to a 5th wheel or gooseneck hitch, or you've got a lot of the bed not used for battery space. There's room under the hood, but it's weirdly shaped space, typically.
I would love an electric pickup that could handle around town work, but even if I start with a free truck body, I'm likely $40k away from a useful conversion, and that's with me doing the work myself. And I still wouldn't get that much use out of it, because I couldn't do any longer hauling with it (the bulk of my trips in trip count are about 40 mile round trips to the home improvement store, but the few longer trips I take, often with 5k-8k lb of trailer back there, make up a good fraction of the miles).
For that cost, I could buy a very nice used diesel truck, and still have a ton of money left over for other projects, carbon offsets, nice charity donations, a bunch of public EV charging stations, or whatever else I wanted to do.
The problem is that competent electric pickups have been "coming soon now" for most of a decade. Via Motors was announcing extended range electric pickups on Chevy gliders back in 2012 or so - and they've since pivoted a few times and not delivered any of those things (at least that I'm aware of, and certainly not in any meaningful numbers). A 50 mile range on battery with a good trailer, then a gas or diesel range extender, with a big split phase inverter built in, would sell like hotcakes to construction companies - you can haul your trailer to the jobsite, power the jobsite before the power company gets around to running lines without the small generators otherwise used for that, recharge at night, and pay a fraction the operating costs of a diesel you'd otherwise use for that. Think $0.05-$0.10/mi (depending on power costs) vs $0.25-$0.30/mi, plus generator costs. That adds up in a hurry.
But nobody sells one. I've no idea why. So diesel it is. Gassers are fine for infrequent towing, but their lifespan is an awful lot shorter if you use them for it regularly for towing.
I'm aware the Cybertruck is "coming soon now," and that it's rated for 14k lbs, but as I've stated elsewhere in this sidetrack, you have to be somewhat insane to hang 14k lbs on a receiver mount (I'm actually not even sure that's permitted everywhere). That much tongue weight (1000+ lbs, perhaps even 2000 lbs for high speed stability) really needs to be on or slightly forward of the rear axle for combo stability. There's a big difference between "It can move it on flat ground" and "It can safely tow it long distances in somewhat adverse conditions." A ~6000 lb truck, with 14k hanging on the receiver, is (IMO) an unsafe combination.
All of the above skips the legal problems with radically changing a vehicle (which an EV conversion is) and ensuring it's legal and certified for road operation. Hobby conversions and low volume conversions tend to fall between the cracks, but anything of a scale to matter would have to solve those problems, and they're far from trivial.
Anyway, if I'm missing something, please, let me know. But what you're arguing "should exist," as far as I know, "Doesn't exist, and won't exist."
Yeah, EVWest has been doing the work for a while now. You are correct that it currently isn't cheap, and is more complicated/DIY than anyone currently wants to call "easy", but that's the definition of "we have the technology". The next steps are productionizing it/industrializing it, which I also pointed out in my comment.
It exists as an "artisanal" option today. Per VW's roadmap they expect to have more "off the shelf" components in the near future. Ford doesn't have it on their radar at all it seems, but as I point out that's likely a blindspot on Ford's part that should be addressed (and if they don't do it, the aftermarket will, even if it starts "bottom up" from the "artisanal" shops).
> The problem is that competent electric pickups have been "coming soon now" for most of a decade
Beyond the ones you mentioned (Via Motors, Tesla Cybertruck):
Rivian have been taking preorders and are expected to deliver some of the first ones this year.
While Ford don't have EV conversions on their radar, they do have new purchased trucks. The electric version of the F-150 is supposed to be their second EV following this year's Mustang Mach-E. Rumors are that the official launch and some very early presales could start as soon as the end of this year (though most analysts are expecting Ford is likely more serious about a 2023 model year).
GM has been relatively cagey what they have planned for the big spectacle 2023 model year, but many indications are that among the "12 currently unannounced EV models" for 2023 at least three or four of them are going to be trucks across the Chevy and GMC brands, on the "Ultium" platform they beta-tested in the 2021 Hummer EV.
Lordstown Motors has seen some fraud concerns and stock shorting controversies, but is entirely focused on EV Trucks right now (similar to Rivian) and were expected to have deliveries of their first model (the Endurance) start last year, but are seemingly delayed to at least "late" this year/early next year.
(Fwiw, the "coming soon now" for the Tesla Cybertruck is also "late" this year/early next year, with delays noted due to pandemic reasons and usual Tesla timeline slippage.)
It's not just trucks - I was able to get my (pre-cheating-scandal) 2003 VW TDI to belch a cloud of smoke if I idled for a while (over five minutes) then worked it hard (e.g. a freeway onramp). I remember getting honked at by a Prius once...
IMO, these occasional particulate emissions were outweighed by the excellent fuel economy - rated at 46 MPG but regularly 43 MPG.
Of course, this technology has been largely obsoleted by electric drivetrains. No rolling coal from a Tesla!
> My truck (24 years and change) will smoke a bit if I stand on it and the fuel flow outruns boost coming up, but it's also entirely emissions compliant and passes the tests cleanly - it's just something older diesels do under certain conditions
I always thought that banning old diesels from centers of European cities was just silly (they passed their emissions after all so they can't be billowing smoke, right?), thanks for changing my opinion
No problem. If your concern is the particulate matter, then, yes, banning old diesels makes some sense. They don't have the particulate filters - those started showing up in the 2000-2010 era. However, I would rather see that implemented as tighter standards, and if you can meet them with a retrofit kit, you can continue driving the older ones. We saw this with noise kits for older jets (retrofit kits that reduce the noise to the new standards), and if the concern is specifically emissions, then if you can make an older vehicle meet the newer standards, there's no reason to keep them out. I'm not a fan of arbitrarily destroying old but operational equipment.
My truck is a '97, and I believe the smoke opacity limit for emissions testing is 40% (it's allowed to block/scatter 40% of the light going through the exhaust). I believe commercial trucks of the same age are held to roughly the same standards. That's a good bit of smoke in the exhaust. But until you get into the high pressure common rail stuff (up at 30k+ psi, multiple injections per cycle), you'll get some smoke under certain conditions.
Looking at emissions standards in Europe, a truck from 24 years ago in Europe, assuming its gross vehicle weight is between 1760 kg and 3500 kg, would be allowed to emit 0.25g of PM/km. The same limit for something built since 2013 is 0.0045g of PM/km. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude improvement here.
As a sidenote, HO+NOx has gone from 1.7g/km to 0.350g/km in 2013 (and onto 0.215g/km since then, in 2016), which is often as significant when it comes to desires to reduce air pollution.
Emissions standards change over time. You could get some really polluting cars in the old days, and you can't anymore. Why should we be breathing in the smoke from these old cars from an era where emissions and pollution weren't taken as seriously as now?
The proportion of old vehicles on the road is small. And the last thing most of the people who drive them need is additional expensive compliance hoops to drive through.
For every hipster yuppie driving "muh classic Hilux just like daddy owned in 1993" there a few dozen people living out of the back of a Caprice Classic wagon because they have no better option.
Never heard of this before, I looked it up, but I still don't get it -- you're not getting more power, you're not getting better fuel efficiency, you're not getting a smoother ride, what's the point - you're literally burning money for no reason?
Correct. And destroying your engine in the process. Beyond washing down the cylinder walls (cylinder/ring wear) and diluting the engine oil in the process (worse lubrication for the bearings), EGTs tend to go absolutely nuts during the process (you're on the oxygen limited side of mixture, not the fuel limited side a diesel is intended to operate in), which means you stand a good chance of doing damage to the hot side of the turbocharger (high EGTs tend to start melting the corner tips of the turbine blades first, which is an easy check for a used diesel - if the blade corners aren't right, the engine has probably been abused), and it's hard on the rest of the engine too.
It's quite literally as stupid as it sounds.
There are cases where you do want to run a diesel like that - some of the custom tractor pulling engines will smoke an awful lot while they're spooling up and pulling, but that's an engine that's making insane horsepower for a short period of time, and they don't have a particularly long service life (like any competition engine). I believe they run on the rich side to use the excess fuel to keep combustion temperatures down (a stoichiometric mixture is usually far, far too hot). But on a road engine, it's just pointless engine abuse for style points (among the few people who actually think it's cool).
I've only ever seen it once when I was in an EV Uber (it was a Model S) behind a pickup truck in Baltimore and the pickup kept blasting us with massive amounts of black soot (presumably because we were in an EV).
There's a political element of "Truck Driving Republican" vs. "EV Driving Liberal" that powers some of this. I think Elon has been at last partially trying to reduce this polarization with how he behaves online to widen Tesla's appeal (though maybe I'm attributing too much intentionality here).
On the west coast I was tailed super aggressively by a pickup in my model 3 on 280 which was a little scary (blinding me with headlights, switching lanes to stay 1 inch behind me). I watched cameras after to see if I cut him off or something, but I didn't. It has made me more wary of pick up trucks in general though.
That sucks. I wish it were an automatic open-and-shut case to prosecute dangerous driving / vehicular assault like this when a court is provided with dashcam evidence.
